"mice" news and stories

Mice love cheese, no matter what its form.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., cheesecake institution Junior's, founded in downtown Brooklyn in 1950, prides itself as "New York's Best Cheesecake," but it's now scrambling to clean up its reputation after photographs posted on the Internet over the weekend show some rodents enjoying a snack in the bakery's window display.

Controversial piece at Slate (written by a former anorexic, Kate Taylor) that compares calorie restriction diets to anorexia itself.

She links to several New York Times articles that seem to show that calorie restriction extends the lives of monkeys and mice and is now being tested on humans too.

I'm not an expert in healthy weight management, beyond the usual "reduce your calories, eat correctly, and exercise regularly" that we always hear. It's interesting to hear a former anorexic talk about how she's confused by all of the talk that a "low metabolism" might actually be good for you, though I think comparing the two is a stretch.

Here's a follow-up piece, where Taylor talks about the Calorie Restriction Society and how that might be a different kind of "eating disorder." You should also read the message boards at the end of the piece.

At Harvard Medical School, an experiment involving red wine has yielded some very interesting results. The study found that the effects of a poor, high-calories diet were offset by a chemical that is naturally found in red wine, resveratrol, which comes from the skin of grapes. On top of that, it seemed to help extend the lifespan in general.

The study was only conducted on mice, not people. The mice were fed a diet in which 60% of the calories came from fat. All the mice gained weight, but the ones that were also given a "a large daily dose of resveratrol" had " all the pleasures of gluttony but paid none of the price" and lived just as well, physically and mentally, as the mice on healthy diets did.

The only problem is not that the study was conducted on mice, but the dose of resveratrol that they were given. One litre of red wine contains 1.5 to 3 milligrams of resveratrol. "A 150-pound person would need to drink from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day" to get the same dose as the mice, 24-mg per kg of body weight. Smaller amounts would have a positive, but correspondingly weaker, effect, but since the results are no confirmed on humans yet, limiting yourself to an extra glass of wine is probably still a better idea than having an extra bottle.

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